Grimsby EXCLUSIVE: New manager Michael Jolley on how 9/11 attacks changed his life

GRIMSBY TOWN'S new manager Michael Jolley got caught up in 9/11 whilst working in New York.

Michael Jolley's first match in charge of Grimsby was a 1-1 draw at home to Port Vale

It was a bright Tuesday morning on Manhattan island and Michael Jolley, a young corporate bond trader, was sat at his desk in Midtown.

He was 23, had a Cambridge University economics degree in his back pocket and a bulging wallet in his front one. Life was good.

Then, below the blizzard of numbers on the screen in front of him, something caught his eye. The rolling news feed at the bottom – the Bloomberg ticker – flashed up that a plane had flown into the side of the World Trade Centre two miles away.

Initially, the talk in the office was that it must have been an accident with a light aircraft but, once the second plane hit, it became horribly apparent what was going on. 9/11 – a date the world and Jolley will never forget.

“We were very close to the Empire State Building so we were frightened that could be a target too. I left the office and walked north back towards my apartment. I saw the towers fall from the street,” he recalls.

“It was an absolutely horrendous experience and such a sad time. I spoke regularly to a broker who was lost that day. I’d actually spoken to him that morning.

“I worked with another guy had to go to nearly 40 funerals because he knew so many people that were involved. These are things that do stay with you.

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Michael Jolley was previously manager at Swedish club AFC Eskilstuna

“It was probably a prompt in thinking: ‘Is this what I want to do with the rest of my life?’ I was quite competent at what I did and it paid me fairly well – but if what had happened to all those people happened to me would I be happy with what I had done with my life?”

And so a chain of events was set in motion that today sees 40-year-old Michael Jolley sat behind a desk in a portakabin at Grimsby Town’s Cheapside training base as a football manager.

It is from the outside an unlikely appointment. An Oxbridge bond trader, with one brief spell as a manager with Swedish side Eskilstuna behind him, operating as the gaffer in the nether regions of League Two? Who thought that one up?

But Grimsby, who by their own admission wanted to move off the usual managerial merry-go-round in an attempt to pull out of their current nosedive, have seen something well, different, in Jolley.

Football had always been his first love. Growing up, he had a peak behind the curtain at Stockport County where his father was a director and then, as a teenager, another at Barnsley where he was on the academy books as a decent, if one-paced midfielder.

It was just that when he was released at 16, he thought the door to it had closed.

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The September 11 attacks in New York killed almost 3,000 people injuring 6,000 more

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There were casualties from over 90 countries during the events, including 67 Britons

“My father and I sat down when I was released by Barnsley and we both agreed it was unlikely I’d become a professional footballer,” he says.

“My dad was really big on education. His father had died early and he’d left school early to work but had gone back into education and it had really changed things for him. He told me to go and get a degree.”

So he did. From Cambridge. It was quite a leap from Sheffield College. “I’m not a naturally brainy person. I’m just someone who slugs it out,” he says.

He played in two Varsity football matches at Craven Cottage – skipping a third because he thought he knew best over the team set-up – before moving into finance in London and then New York.

When he returned to the capital he began to dip his toe into football again, sitting his coaching badges, before taking the plunge and resigning to pursue a career in it.

“A few people were probably thinking: ‘why on earth would you give up what most people would consider to be a really good salary in the City to earn virtually nothing as a part-time football academy coach’ – but I didn’t see it that way.

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Michael Jolley's Grimsby slipped to a 3-1 defeat away to Lincoln in their last outing

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Grimsby are 22nd in League Two with eight games remaining

Money is important but it’s not everything,” he says.

“I took the view that in the end if I stuck at it for long enough the football would pay me back anyway, although I’m still waiting for that to happen!

“The route to Grimsby has been one less travelled, taking in Crystal Palace, Nottingham Forest, Falkirk, Crewe and Burnley where he studied at the University of Sean Dyche as under-23s coach. “I think I could go through my whole career and not see management delivered as well as it is at Burnley,” he says.

“I can’t sit here and do an impression of Sean Dyche and Grimsby can’t pretend to be Burnley but if I try to apply the principles he has done I think it’s a really good starting point.”

There is a lot of pressure in football management, especially fighting to stay in the Football League. Almost three weeks into his appointment, he is still awaiting his first win.

But as a first-hand witness to the Twin Towers atrocity he is well aware that however much it means at the time football is a long way from life or death.

“If I ever think I’m having a bad day that event certainly serves to put into perspective what’s really important.”